The political uses of memory: Instagram and Black-Asian solidarities

Abstract

This study investigates how activist organizations wield collective memory as they advance cross-racial solidarity on Instagram. We center digital memory-making in political work by Black and Asian activist organizations as a contribution to understanding social movement communication and online organizing. We study Instagram content from local organizations in Minneapolis (and the Midwest region), Atlanta (and the Southeast region), and national digital organizing collectives between the end of May 2020 to June 2021. This corpus of material includes the summer uprisings for Black liberation following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, as well as the increased visibility of incidents of anti-Asian violence during the COVID-19 pandemic, including a mass shooting at massage parlors in Atlanta. Among our findings is the centrality of memories of internationalist feminist movements to contemporary cross-racial politics.